Mental health a concern for older people

by Bill Mead

Most folks my age have seen friends and relatives of their vintage fade into the dim world of senile dementia, often when their physical conditions remain fairly robust. We tend to label this condition Alzheimer's Disease even though Alzheimer's is only one of several causes for older minds to start blinking out. My wife and I assume my father's loss of mental capacity was the result of Alzheimer's but he was never officially diagnosed that way. Alzheimer's is a syndrome, a collection of symptoms, not something that can be absolutely pinned down with a blood test or other definitive diagnostic tool.

For the victims of senile dementia and their caregivers, it doesn't make much difference what you call it. The fact that senile dementia exists is probably the ultimate terror for people of retirement age, although in rare instances it happens to younger people as well. People of all ages try not to think about cancer, heart disease and other physical ailments but this is background anguish. For old people, senile dementia is too close to ignore.

According to U.S. Census figures, I'm older than 90 percent of the population of California. If anybody is going to lose his marbles it probably should be me. Although a number of my readers may suspect there is something dreadfully wrong with my thought processes, I don't show the typical signs of senile dementia. Still, like most of my contemporaries, the possibility edges closer to the forefront of my fears with the passing of time. Whenever I have a moment of forgetfulness I pass it off as a senior moment but I don't consider it a joke, even though my current mental lapses don't seem any worse than what they were 50 years ago. I am bothered, however, by my frequent inability to remember names. That problem is clearly more pronounced than it used to be. Somebody once told me it's because my brain is so packed with data over the past 79 years that it takes longer for it to be retrieved. I'm not sure that computer analogy is accurate but I like it.

A few weeks ago one of our dinner guests, What's Her Name, explained that it's typical for really old dudes like me to have trouble recalling nouns, not just proper names. I have to wonder about that because I have no hesitation in recalling nouns such as dinner, beer or tax refund. They come readily to mind. So far it's only names that cause me trouble. As an example, I read a piece in this paper a few weeks ago about a farmer in Fredericksburg, Texas. I told my wife that Fredericksburg is also the home town of famous World War II Admiral … and my brain shut down. It was almost 10 minutes later that my random access memory slipped into gear and the name Chester Nimitz poured forth.

This and similar snags in recalling names reinforces my belief that it's the vast amount of information I have accumulated in my gray matter that is causing the temporary blockage, not some cockamamie theory that I can't handle nouns. That being the case, some brilliant surgeon ought to come up with a way to boost brain capacity the same way computers can have additional memory installed. I had that done with my Compaq computer a couple of months ago and two weeks later the whole machine crashed.

Can we talk about something else?

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